Tuesday 13 April 2010 02.00 EDT
First published on Tuesday 13 April 2010 02.00 EDT

Michael Gove, the shadow education secretary, is a journalist for the Times newspaper. He has written four books (now out of print), including a supremely toadying biography of Michael Portillo, and appears regularly on Newsnight Review, displaying, in heavily manicured voice, a capacity for over-loquaciousness on a seemingly limitless array of cultural matters. As a result of these endeavours, he has been presented to the electorate, and to the education community in particular, as an extravagantly gifted, polymath genius.

Given that in less than a month he may be in charge of the education chances of our country's young people, it is well worth a look at what new places Gove's intellectualism will take us. Aside from constant repetition of the phrase, "it works very well in Sweden", what exactly are his ideas?

In a recent article Gove stated, with no little pride, that the parent-led schools that will be allowed to burgeon following a Tory victory – and which Fiona Millar has predicted will be run by existing academy sponsors, or for-profit organisations, not by the parents who set them up – would be "non-selective grammar schools". Immediately, we wonder whether Gove's much-vaunted intellect was taking a day off. Since, by definition, a grammar school selects its pupils, a non-selective grammar is either a clumsy, oxymoronic, non-sequitur; or a weaselly way of admitting that the Conservatives finally recognise that comprehensive education works.

Gove takes an absurdly intrusive view of what should happen in classrooms – "most parents would rather their children had a traditional education, with children sitting in rows, learning the kings and queens of England, the great works of literature, proper mental arithmetic, algebra by the age of 11, modern foreign languages. That's the best training for the mind and that's how children will be able to compete," he says.

This conflates his recollection of the education he had with the education most parents want. In fact, parents are more likely to want a 21st-century education that allows children to think for themselves and equips them for the future than one so firmly focused on re-instating dead tradition that it discounts any pedagogic advances made since the time of Oliver Cromwell, and regards the most important part of acquisition of knowledge, skills and understanding as being the rote learning of a series of dates.

For his proposed committee of the "greatest minds in Britain" that would design the curriculum, read anyone who has appeared on television in the role of an academic. Carol Vorderman has already been appointed to advise maths teachers how to teach maths. In summarily dismissing the talents and decisions of vastly experienced members of the education profession, most of whom have spent decades learning their trade, and ditching these in favour of the non-thoughts of someone who no longer does the sums on daytime television, Gove sends out an anti-education message to both electorate and teachers alike, striking a populist pose designed to chime with the nation's obsession with celebrity.

If that were not bad enough, Gove holds up the thoughts on state education of one Charles, Prince of Wales as the exemplary voice of rich experience. Prince Charles, who, like most of those now pontificating on the way forward for state schools, did not attend one; and who, as the recipient of two less-than-excellent A-levels and a lower-second degree, would not qualify to be a teacher under the Tories' conflation of teaching ability with A-level grades. Like Gove, however, he is desperately concerned that the curriculum has been dumbed down.

Not content with nearly prompting a constitutional crisis through his views on "proper" architecture, Prince Charles now believes he should have a say in what is on the curriculum, while Gove stands on the side applauding, scribbling down his ideas. "Note to self – make deference lessons part of core curriculum."

In Gove's brave new world, the serious structural inequalities in British education will all be solved by learning poetry by rote and throwing a token Latin lesson at uncomprehending inner-city kids. The near future will be characterised by a cabal of decision-makers who have no experience of state education, believing they are experts, and assuming that since a "traditional" education worked for them, a version of the same is exactly what the doctor ordered for those at the bottom of society. This is rank idiocy. On stilts. Writ large. In a shocking pink tutu. Doing the can-can. For a well-rounded and cultured intellectual, Gove's pronouncements on the curriculum do a remarkably good impression of the underdeveloped views of a callow sixth-former reciting prejudices at a minor public school.